The
Worlds of J.G. Ballard
J(ames)
G(raham) Ballard (1930-2009) was an English author of avant-garde
fiction who published nineteen novels and novellas and one hundred short
stories, many of which were controversial, prescient, or both. Very broadly,
his career can be divided into two stages, science fiction and literature. The
first began with the publication of ‘Escapement’ in New Worlds in 1956
and the second with the publication of Empire of the Sun, his eleventh
novel, in 1984. Along with Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss (1925-2017),
Ballard was one of the founders of the New Wave of science fiction, which
originated in New Worlds magazine in the mid-nineteen-sixties and
reconstituted the genre as an extension of literary modernism focused on the
psychological rather than physical impact of technology. Ballard’s science
fiction can itself be divided into two stages. His first four novels (or
novellas, depending on one’s preferred definition) pioneered Anglophone climate
fiction. The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The
Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966) constitute an elemental
quartet in which civilisation is threatened or destroyed by air, water, fire,
and earth respectively. Ballard’s next six novels were much more experimental,
putting his ideas about the relationship between the content of science fiction
and formal innovation into practice, and include The Atrocity Exhibition
(1970) and Crash (1973). The critical and commercial success of Empire
of the Sun elevated Ballard to the literary canon and it was released as a
Hollywood film directed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. Like his science fiction,
Ballard’s literature can also be divided into two stages, with Cocaine
Nights (1996) and his last three novels usually referred to as satire.
The
last book Ballard published before his death from prostate cancer was Miracles
of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (2008), an autobiography written after his
terminal diagnosis. It’s not very often that anyone, let alone a great
novelist, has the opportunity to write an autobiography that will include
(almost) their entire life story, but I found it for the most part disappointing.
Ballard always valued his privacy and the autobiography is strangely unenlightening.
The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard (2026),
a biography that was begun by Christopher Priest (1943-2024) and completed by
his wife, Nina Allan, when he died of prostate cancer in 2024, is much
more revealing. In his review of Priest and Allan’s book in The Guardian, Adam Sisman concurs with my
criticism of Miracles of Life by calling it ‘curiously flat’. There are certainly
no insights into Ballard’s creative process or literary practice, which was
what I had most hoped to find. When I discovered that his archive had been
acquired by the British Library in 2010 and was now available to the public, I thought
I’d try there instead, but Ballard’s reticence extended to the private sphere and
his habit was apparently to destroy his notes for his fiction as soon as it was
published. While the archive contains multiple drafts of multiple novels,
including those of three of his four early climate fictions, much of both his
process and practice remains opaque.
The
J.G. Ballard Papers
In
the ‘Works’ section of the archive only three of the one hundred and sixty-two
files are described as projects for a new novel or working notes. The first of
these is a set of four text collages that were published in New Worlds
in 1978, the second a set of five spiral-bound notepads (one of which has only
two pages of notes) that were probably used from 2005 to 2008, and the third
five typed A4 pages, also likely dated 2005 to 2008. One of the pages, Notepad
A, most of Notepad B, and a few pages each in Notepads C and D are notes for a novel
that was never written, provisionally titled An Immodest Proposal or How the
World Declared War on America and abbreviated as ‘VUS’ ([World] versus US).
Allan recounts her visit to the archive in 2024 and discusses these notes and
other materials in The Illuminated Man and it was pure chance that I
visited less than a month after reading it. Something that comes across very
strongly in the biography and was very useful in providing a context for the
notes was the extent to which Ballard was affected by the September 11 attacks
and what is now known as GWOT, the Global War on Terror.
Ballard’s
notes for VUS include everything one might expect to find, from the premise at
its most basic to alternative ideas for plot and character, considerations of
form and content, and reflections on whether and how he could meet its
particular challenges. The proposed narrative is typical of Ballard in being
located in an unspecified but imminent future, taking the present rather than
the future as its subject, and providing commentary on current social mores and
norms. The present with which he is concerned is the increase of the US’
military footprint in response to 9/11, specifically the invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Ballard does not connect these to either
Panama in 1989, Grenada in 1983, or the US’ military deployments during the
Cold War and seems to have regarded GWOT as an unprecedented phenomenon. He is
also well aware of the symbolic significance of 9/11 and the care with which
both the targets and the date of the four coordinated attacks were planned.
I’ll begin my discussion of the novel by setting out the fictional sequence of
events on which the narrative would be based. Unlike more precise questions of
form and content, on which Ballard is often undecided, the sequence is fairly
comprehensive and consistent.
VUS
The
setting of VUS is a world in which the US has established an empire reminiscent
of the European colonies of an earlier age. America controls all of the Middle
East, including Israel, and most of the world’s oil supply. Many countries
across the globe are either occupied by the US, have puppet regimes, or are sympathetic
to the US. In those countries that are occupied or have puppet regimes,
‘American values are relentless enforced.’ The same values are relentlessly
promoted in the countries with sympathetic governments, such as the UK and
Germany. The US exerts a global hegemony by the combination of military threat
and economic pressure and insists on preferential trade agreements for all of
its goods, including oil. France is one of the few countries to remain openly
anti-American and tries to import oil from an alternative supplier (Venezuela
is mentioned at least twice). In response, the US initiates a naval blockade,
which causes skirmishes at sea and anti-American civil unrest globally. There
is a naval battle between the US and France, which the US wins, and the United
Nations Security Council authorises military action if the US fails to abandon
both its preferential trade agreements and foreign military bases. Predictably,
the US refuses and the world declares war on the US, led by either the rest of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation nations or by a combined NATO-Russia
alliance.
The
war that follows has three stages. In the first, which is a conventional, high-intensity
conflict, the US achieves a rapid victory over NATO, using weapons of mass
destruction to destroy military and civilian targets and occupying all the
nations who have taken up arms against it. US global hegemony is transformed
into a global empire. No Pax Americana materialises, however, as
multiple insurgencies begin, starting in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia and then
spreading to other countries. This second, unconventional, stage culminates in
a series of coordinated attacks aimed at destroying nine icons within the US
homeland. The US responds in a similar manner to its response to the
declaration of war, causing mass casualties among insurgents and civilians at
home and abroad. In the homeland, Black and Muslim communities are targeted,
which initiates the third and final stage. Black, Muslim, and other soldiers in
the US Army mutiny, violence in the homeland spirals, and America descends into
a second civil war. Ballard doesn’t describe the impact of this civil war on
the empire, but the implication is that it crumbles and that the world is consequently
victorious against the US.
The
subject of the novel at its most basic is simply ‘US imperialism’, but Ballard’s
concern extended beyond military expansion to America’s dominance of global
popular culture, from Hollywood to McDonald’s to Elvis and so much else. He was
especially interested in the way in which this cultural hegemony was causing
people to see themselves through an American lens and how this succeeded in
turning other nations into ‘subservient colonies’ (without the need for puppet
regimes or invasion). Ballard has various ideas about how to turn this subject
into a theme, the most consistent of which is that the US would be ‘treated as
Nazi Germany in 1939-45’ with no characters in the novel permitted to adopt a
neutral stance. He was more certain about the characters that would drive the
narrative. His initial idea was to use three ‘principle [sic]’
characters and three ‘secondary’ characters. He later refers to these six as an
‘inner core’. The characters would all be of different nationalities and the
protagonist, who would be British, and three others would be men. The
protagonist is an English university lecturer who teaches American Studies at a
university in the Middle East and has an American wife (which is significant
because it will allow him to gain entry to the homeland later on). A second principal
character, also a man, would be French. The nationalities of the others would
be drawn from Japan, Russia, Australia, Germany, an unspecified Muslim country,
and possibly Israel. Ballard then thought that one of the women should also be British,
which may have been why he expanded his central characters to seven, four men
and three women. The characters would either be in professions that would bring
them into direct contact with the war, such as the military, media, or
medicine, or foreign workers, such as those in oil, education, or diplomacy.
Ballard
started to delineate the French protagonist, couldn’t think of anything
interesting, and wrote: ‘All need to be thoughtful + of heroic potential.’ He
was also convinced that all ‘should have suffrered [sic] in some way
from the US — —’ and these two ideas taken together suggest that a major part
of the narrative would be the planning, recruitment, and execution of the
coordinated attacks on American icons, some or all of which would be suicidal.
He wanted to break the stereotype for people that were prepared to sacrifice
themselves in this way and noted that the insurgents should be ‘educated,
intellectual, even unwilling.’ Whether or not the insurgency would be led by a
Muslim cadre was unclear, although his sequence of events identifies it as beginning
in Middle Eastern nations. Ballard made several lists of the insurgent targets,
which included a wide range from the Empire State Building to the Capitol to
Las Vegas and Disneyland. Each of these would be attacked or destroyed using a
different tactic, although his list of options for these only ran to eight. At
one point, he refers to these as ‘psycho-targets’, drawing attention to their
symbolic significance to the US and to the psychological impact of their
destruction. The novel would open outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in
London during the heightened tensions of the naval blockade. After a protest
turns violent, US troops open fire on the crowd, who scatter and destroy a
nearby McDonald’s in retaliation. The event would either be described in the
form of a news report (assuming Ballard’s original idea for his British
protagonist) or in the first person by his (alternative) British protagonist. Ballard
did not state when the novel would conclude and the options appear to be either
the mutiny, the civil war, or the dissolution of the US empire.
Ballard
seems to have had much less of a vision as to how he would tell the story of
VUS than what the story was. He planned to switch point of view among his
principal characters and mix these different points of view with reportage from
different media channels. He was not, however, sure whether the novel would be
narrated in the first person, by the different principal (or principal and
secondary) characters, and whether these narrations would be presented as
individual testimonies, oral histories, or diary entries. He also toyed with
the idea of opening with an academic-style introduction to the collected
testimonies and reports, rather than in medias res. Beyond that, he had
very little to say about specific aspects of framework, function, structure, or
symbolism. Notwithstanding, his reflections on the genre of the novel are fascinating:
‘Very important Must not allow this to become s-f. That would lower its
credibility & impact.’ He was similarly worried that the novel doesn’t
become ‘a familiar kind of s-f story.’ Ballard’s approach to science fiction
was, as already mentioned, to prioritise the present over the future for the
purpose of social commentary, which he often achieved by exploring the impact
of either the broader public and political world or the immediate physical
environment in which each person lives on their inner, psychological world. These
New Wave commitments are completely compatible with what he was trying to
achieve with and in VUS so it is curious that he was so determined to avoid the
novel ‘becoming’ a work of science fiction. I wonder if the clue to this
apparent anomaly isn’t the dating of the notebooks, some thirty years after the
decline of the New Wave. What he probably means by ‘becoming’ is ‘being
labelled/sold as’ science fiction, which had become a genre very much dominated
by series and franchises by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first
century. I think that what he didn’t want was VUS being sold and read as an
alternative history or a dystopian or apocalyptic narrative and I’ll return to
the question of genre in my conclusion.
The
Illuminated Man
Ballard
was both confident that his premise was strong and worried about his ability to
do it justice. I find this particularly interesting coming from someone who
practically invented climate fiction, had established himself as one of Britain’s
greatest living authors, and already published eighteen novels and novellas.
Although his belief in his ability to develop the premise into a rich and
rewarding theme appeared to grow as he built up his body of notes, his modesty
and diffidence are evident throughout. For example, he writes: ‘Need to add a
specific spin of some kind?’; ‘Need a deeper dimension!’; ‘too depressing &
reminiscent of 1984?’. More specifically, he was concerned that the novel would
be too long (presumably because of its temporal and spatial scope) and with his
competence in writing first person narratives from the point of view of characters
from cultures distinct from his own, such as the proposed Middle Eastern,
Japanese, and Russian principal or secondary characters. Both of these problems
were related to the question of how to present a ‘global sense of the
battle against the US?’ Ballard was also concerned about the credibly of what
he called ‘The fight back’, i.e. the success of the insurgency: ‘But is it all
credible if its [sic] realistically portrayed?’ I ruminated on this myself,
the dichotomy between the ease with which the US wins a conventional war
against the rest of the world and the speed with which the insurgency leads to
the dissolution of the US empire. But I also have no doubt that Ballard would
have solved this literary problem as skilfully as he had solved others in his
previous novels, novellas, and short stories. He makes a quick reference to a
potential solution when he writes: ‘Perhaps visualise it as a film script.’ The
process of both writing the notes down and returning to read them later seem to
have helped because although there is no way to be certain of the chronological
order of either the notepads or notes within them, there is definitely a sense
of progress, of the crystallisation of a constellation of ideas as a premise
and a sequence of events become a theme and a narrative.
It’s
impossible to say know whether Ballard would have proceeded with the project
had he not been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but if I had to guess one way
or the other I’d say yes, given the escalation of GWOT from 2005 to 2009 and
beyond. VUS would definitely have been one of his most controversial novels,
perhaps even more so than The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, and
I imagine he would have been accused of both glorifying 9/11 and promoting
political violence. I am fairly certain that VUS would have been banned in many
US states. Assuming it had been released early in the second decade of the
twenty-first century, when Big Tech was achieving its own hegemony, I wonder if
the publishers would have actively courted controversy to increase sales or
insisted that the novel stay on the science fiction shelf. Like The Drowned
World, The Drought, and many of Ballard’s other long and short stories,
there is also a sense in which VUS is prescient. Mark Blacklock beat me to that
point in his essay in The New Statesman, which refers to the regime
change in Venezuela in January 2026 and what is currently being called the 2026
Iran war, although Ballard did not anticipate how divided the (rest of the)
‘world’ would be in the era of VUS. What I can perhaps add to Blacklock and
where Ballard and I would disagree, is that this military muscle-flexing is
nothing new, just part of an imperial imperative that stretches back to at
least the US invasion of Grenada. That was in 1983, the year before Ballard was
catapulted into the limelight with Empire of the Sun, a novel about a
different empire. As the sun sets on one, it rises on another…
